London: Days 1 & 2

Well, we made it! We flew out June 7 at about 10:15 AM and after a brief stop in New York, we flew into London, landing at around 7:30 AM. Unfortunately, neither one of us had very much luck sleeping on the plane, (we watched Sherlock Holmes instead), so we were both exhausted by the time we got in. We went to our hotel, but couldn't check in, so we dropped off our heavy bags and went to find something to do. Of course, while dropping off our bags, we also dropped off our cameras (oops).

Anyway, we decided to take the tube over to Westminster Abby, which was beautiful. We toured around inside and walked around outside for a while. Basically, until I didn't think I could stand up anymore. Luckily, at that point it was after 1:00, so we headed back to the hotel to check in and get some much needed sleep.

We woke up around 5:30 and went out (this time with our cameras) to find some dinner.

We went to a pub in Leicester Square (which kind of looked like the Times Square of London) and ordered some fish and chips. I'm not actually a huge fan of fish, but this was pretty good. And huge. After dinner, we wandered around outside for a while and found the Somerset House. From there we saw the London Eye and decided that sunset would be a cool time to get a good look at the city.

After walking around a bit more, we went back to the hotel to sleep. Our room looks like this:

So we have a shower and a sink, but no toilet. The toilet is down two floors. Oh well, it could be worse.

Today, we started out late after catching up on some sleep, and had breakfast at a cafe down the street where we heard the sweetest british grandpa reading Thomas the Tank Engine to his grand daughter. It was adorable. After that, we took the tube to try and find the Tate Modern Museum. Instead, St. Paul's Cathedral caught our attention, so we stopped there. We ended up climbing around 500 steps to get an awesome view of the city.

Anyway, after the Cathedral, we bought sandwiches at a little store and ate them on the steps. Greg even fed some birds. (Isn't that where the "feed the birds" lady sits in Mary Poppins?) Next, we found the Tate Modern and walked across the Milennium Bridge to get there. I'm pretty sure that's the bridge that was destroyed by the death eaters in the last Harry Potter. The museum was great (and free) and we saw a bunch of Picasso, Andy Warhol, and "The Kiss" by Rodin.

That was most of our day today. We only have two days left here before we move on to Edinburgh!